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Three months ago crews were clearing out a side channel in the Sacramento River in Redding, creating a place for endangered salmon to spawn and rear their young.

The river was running at a relatively tame 4,865 cubic-feet per second, and crews could drive heavy equipment along the eastern banks of the river to the work site just north of the Cypress Avenue Bridge.

That isn’t happening anymore.

The area is now under water, and the river has raged for weeks at levels that have reached 16 times the amount that flowed through the area in November.

Fisheries officials said they are going to have to wait until the river level drops again to find out if the side channel is still viable or if they will need to repair the channel.

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High flows in the Sacramento River threatens work to benefit chinook salmon.

“We hope it’s not (ruined)” said Cynthia Davis, a spokeswoman for the Glenn-Colusa Irrigation District, which dedicated crews and equipment to the $250,000 project.

“You don’t do anything in the river without expecting that’s going to happen. It’s just ironic that it happened right away,” Davis said.

The work at Cypress Avenue Bridge was just the latest attempt to improve habitat for endangered winter-run chinook salmon that spawn in the Sacramento River in Redding.

During February 2016 crews spread 8,500 cubic yards of gravel into the river near the North Market Street bridge. The gravel was placed there for salmon, which build spawning nests in the rocks.

But that rock has probably been washed downstream. The rocks are still in the river, though, and can be used by the fish downstream, said Jason Roberts, a fisheries supervisor for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

“It was anticipated that a large portion of this gravel would mobilize at high flows and wash downstream. This was expected and will provide spawning habitat at downstream locations,” he said.

The U.S. Bureau of Reclamation each year dumps a huge pile of rocks on the banks of the river just downstream of Keswick Dam. Just like the Market Street Bridge rocks, that rock is placed there so it will wash downstream.

Before Shasta and Keswick dams were built on the river, rocks flowed freely down the stream, pushed by the current and used by salmon to build their nests. But the dams now block the gravel from flowing downstream, so fisheries officials place thousands of tons of rocks in the river each year to replace what has been lost.

After five years of drought, the river had become a largely a familiar place to anglers and the fish. But this year’s high flows are pushing gravel and sand around, knocking over old familiar trees along the banks and generally reshaping the flow of the channel.

“It’ll change the river completely,” said Eric Fields, a retail specialist at The Fly Shop in Redding, which specializes in guided fishing trips on the river.

It will probably affect the fishing for a few weeks after the river subsides, he said, as the bugs the fish eat recover from having their feeding grounds disturbed.

The bugs feed on the algae that grow on rocks. But the high flows likely moved the rocks and washed algae off them, he said. Once the algae grows back the bugs will return, he said.

Some of those rocks may have come from another salmon project built in the river in 2014. It was also a side channel designed to be a place where salmon lay their eggs in the gravel and rear their young.

Dave Vogel, senior scientist with Natural Resource Scientists in Red Bluff, said he thinks about the channel every day, wondering whether it has survived the high flows in the river.

“The river has mobilized a lot of gravel, but the question is how much gravel mobilized into the entrance” of the channel, he said.

In 2014 crews cleared out the side channel to benefit spawning salmon. The channel, called Painter’s Riffle, was filled in with gravel in 2011 when flows in the river reached 50,000 cfs, washing a pile of rocks downstream from near the Highway 44 bridge into the riffle, he said.

During February, the volume of water in the river ranged from about 17,000 cfs to 79,000 cfs, raising concerns Painter's Riffle has been filled in again.

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Davis said she and others will be interested to see — after the river level drops — how Painter’s Riffle and the projects have fared this winter.

“We’ll all be curious, and I’m sure there will be surveys,” Davis said.

On Thursday, 59,500 cfs was being released from Keswick Dam. Bureau of Reclamation officials are expected to continue to lower the volume of water in the river. By Monday, releases are expected to be at 30,000 cfs.

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